Samsung KE55S9C Curved OLED TV review: worth the wait

The first OLED television raises the bar

By Eric van BallegoieWednesday October 2, 2013 09:58 AM

Introduction

At the end of last century, CRT TVs slowly disappeared from stores to make room for plasma and LCD flatscreens. Now there's a new technology showing its face, OLED. Hardware.Info had the opportunity to test the Samsung KE55S9C Curved OLED TV. It may still cost an arm and a leg, but there's no denying that OLED raises the bar to a whole other level.

LCD and plasma screens have their own particular advantages and disadvantages. LCDs are not capable of reproducing a true black colour, because of the backlight. Viewing angles are limited, which has an impact on the contrast and colours when you're not sitting directly in front of the TV. Plasma screens don't suffer as much from this, even if black also isn't truly black and the contrast also decreases the more the angle to the TV increases. The screen of a plasma TV also vibrates ever so slightly due to the pulsing manner in which the picture is built up, and plasma TVs tend to use a lot of power.

OLED promises to address those shortcomings of plasma and LCD technology. Each pixel of an OLED television consists of three organic LEDs that only transmit light when they have to, and remain off when there's no picture to be shown. That means that the contrast can be extremely high. OLEDs also have virtually unlimited viewing angles, the contrast doesn't decrease from the side, and colors don't shift. The colour range of OLED TVs is large, and the TV can be made very thin. It's better than the best of both worlds, in other words.

This month Samsung and LG released their first OLED televisions in Europe, both curved 55-inch Full HD models. We had the opportunity for 1.5 days to test a production model of Samsung's KE55S9C SLXXN S9 OLED TV.

Before you run off to the store to get yourself one of these beauties, keep in mind you need to bring with you £7,999. Read on to find out whether it's worth it.